Rough Edges
by Awdures
Summary: Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days..." Post Time Crash: Fifth Doctor's POV.


"_Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days"_

The orange and gold faded, to be replaced by the cool colours of his own TARDIS. Or his _other_ own TARDIS. The Doctor blinked and shook his head a little, refusing to get tangled in the pronouns.

"Unexpected drawback of meeting oneself, that," he said aloud to the empty room. "Underestimated. The nuisance a simple pronoun can cause."

He spoke without really thinking, half to break the silence which seemed particularly pronounced after the jabbering and rambling of his future incarnation. In any case it didn't last for long, as Tegan hurried in.

"What happened?" she demanded.

"Are you alright?" the Doctor asked in lieu of answering.

Tegan rubbed the back of her neck. "I fell out of bed," she admitted. "No harm done I suppose."

"Good. Where's Turlough?"

She rolled her eyes. "Probably still wandering round somewhere. Too stubborn to admit I was right when I said I thought the console room was this way. But what happened? Everything turned upside down and the corridors were all different – I've just spent ten minutes running round the TARDIS trying to get in here!"

"Really?" the Doctor said. "Hmm. But which TARDIS?"

"What are you talking about?" The exasperation in her voice was familiar and he couldn't helping smiling a bit at it. He wondered what she would have made of the high speed half-explanations of the other Doctor.

"We collided," he said simply.

"Crashed, you mean!"

He frowned. "I'm not sure I like the implication in that word. It implies a certain amount of carelessness."

"Does it?" Tegan was smiling now. "Surely not. You?"

"Me." He smiled back. "_Actually_ me. The collision. It was _me_, in point of fact. But not me now. Me then."

Tegan stared at him. "That made no sense."

"None!" he agreed cheerfully. "Absolutely ridiculous, not supposed to happen. Very dangerous."

Tegan ran her hands over her face. "If you're not going to start making sense I'm going back to bed. Think you can avoid hitting anything until morning?"

"I did not hit anything. I was hit." Only as he straightened his shoulders in an attempt to regain some dignity did he remember and pat at his face, relieved to find it its normal shape and presumably age. He whipped his hat off, dropped it on the console and ran a hand through his hair before straightening his jacket – which as promised, did fit properly once again.

Tegan watched in confusion. "Are you alright?" she asked after a moment.

"Quite well. Quite alright. Yes."

He finished checking himself over and turned his attention abruptly to the TARDIS, starting a bevy of checks and monitors to ensure there were no side effects there.

Behind him, he had no doubt that Tegan was giving one of her resigned head shakes at him. After a moment she spoke up.

"Well, good night then. Again."

"Goodnight," he answered distractedly, still focused on the TARDIS.

Only once the checks were running and he was waiting for the results did he look round, forgetting for a moment that she'd already left the room.

He wondered again what she'd have made of his future regeneration. Would she have liked him?

Or maybe the questions was,_ would_ she like him?

Maybe she would get the chance one day. It occurred to the Doctor that he didn't know how far in his own future the other incarnation actually was.

"Long ago," he'd said. From him that could mean almost anything of course, not much to go on.

He thought back. Small details leaked into his memory, unnoticed at the time but seen and remembered regardless, there to be recalled.

The console, he'd moved around so easily and unthinkingly had been different. That in itself was nothing new, and he'd taken long seconds to even notice – so familiar with the functions that the form barely registered. The small details though... repairs, and replacements and some of the strangest jury rigs he'd ever seen... They suggested age and wear.

But then he _had_ mentioned repairs hadn't he? Rebuilding. So they could be recent damage from some accident. Or attack. Perhaps he was even newly regenerated – it might explain the mildly unhinged tearing about at least.

He grimaced slightly. Recent or not, a new regeneration clearly hadn't removed his penchant for finding trouble wherever he went.

More disturbing than the repairs was the odd sense of something... Lost. Or missing. Or empty.

He couldn't put his finger on it and was half inclined to put it down to the odd echoing size of the changed console room. Yet it was hard to shake the sensation that he – or they – had been alone on the TARDIS.

_Alone_.

The word caught in his mind and he felt a sympathetic resonance from the TARDIS itself.

He shrugged again, shivered slightly, trying to dismiss the uncomfortable sensation. It was perfectly possible after all that whatever companions were travelling with him by then had been in their own quarters, resting as Tegan and Turlough were here.

It was perfectly possible and he was perfectly certain it was not true.

Had they all left then? Left like Nyssa. Or worse.

One of his checks beeped in completion and he focussed on it gladly, refusing to let his thoughts pause on Adric's death or start speculating about how long Tegan might stay before something happened that found her limits too. For all his future self had thrown out the name of the Mara so casually, he knew that experience had come close.

He shook his head, frowned at the check results and patted the TARDIS console absently.

"Rough time there. Still, all better now."

There was still something vaguely melancholy in the feel of the ship though and he sighed and decided that it really did need thinking about after all.

His future self was so delighted to see him, so caught up in a bounding nostalgia even in the middle of crisis, it was almost worrying. He couldn't say he felt as fond as all that of any of his prior selves.

If he was honest with himself, he'd admit that he'd seemed to simply career from disaster to disaster lately and what in the galaxies could have happened to make looking back on recent events seem an enjoyable romp was somewhat alarming.

He was in danger of burning through regenerations as quickly as the Master lately.

He grimaced as another recollection struck – however many lives further on his was by the time he decided coral was a good look for his ship, the Master was still there too.

He looked away from the scan results. Turned his back on the console for a moment and struggled with temptation. How many more times was he supposed to have to deal with him anyway?

The Master. The one who survived, and broke every law of time and nature doing it and did it anyway, while he ran around trying to limit the damage and never quite managing it.

Why did he get to break the rules while the Doctor never could? And couldn't he just bend them this once?

Forewarned was forearmed. He'd heard that somewhere he was sure. It had to be a human saying. The notion it implied was distinctly contrary to proper Time Lord values. About as contrary as it was possible to be.

He reached out tentatively with his mind. The TARDIS still felt slightly distressed, that odd sense of emptiness and it was that which decided him.

He opened his awareness fully to the ebb and flow of the timelines around him. He watched the strands twist and branch and sweep back together and around each other.

And he looked where he shouldn't.

He looked at his own.

A tangled mess, it went without saying, but there was a pattern there of sorts. He felt along it, following the string through the labyrinth, in the dark.

A long way indeed but he could feel the new familiarity of that one particular future self there somewhere further along and he followed it.

The timelines wandered, fairly naturally, in spite of the tangled and twisted that any Time Lord would have, quite apart from the erratic lifestyle he led himself, but he was getting closer, seeing a sort of shape to them, when abruptly it all went mad.

As though a lead weight had been dropped into the midst of the fragile strands, crushing and breaking some, bending others around it. Things shattered and split and scattered. It was hard suddenly to hold the thread of his own life because so many others were fragmenting and falling around it.

Something happened up there in his future, something big enough to shatter the timelines of uncountable numbers of lives.

He hesitated. This was more than he'd guessed he might discover in his impulsive curiosity, and it brought back into sharp focus that he shouldn't be doing this at all, but something this big, this dangerous, how could he look away, choose not to know?

Abruptly he felt history skitter and slip. A mental flail as if he'd stepped on ice and felt his heel turn. Not falling, but the edge of it. Losing his balance.

He spun back to the console, staggered and grabbed it with both hands, tearing his mind free of the twisting timelines, free of the temptation.

"Can't know," he gasped. "Didn't know then, so can't know now."

Around him the timelines flickered and writhed. So close. Even fixed points could be changed if the moment was right, and in the wake of a paradox like the one he just come from there would be a weak point in the universe. The right amount of pressure in the right moment would avert what was to come.

But he didn't know what was coming. He told himself that. He didn't know, so he couldn't change it. He didn't know and he couldn't look. But it was something terrible and final, he had already seen that much, and how could he not try to stop it?

He shook his head, tightened his grip on the console edge to keep his balance. He would try of course he would. It was only that he already knew he could do nothing to stop it

Or maybe it would be worse than that. Maybe it would be his efforts that caused it in the end. Without even knowing what it was, he knew that now. He knew how paradoxes bred and multiplied around any tampering with those eternal fixed moments. Every Time Lord knew it. It was driven home constantly, the warnings incorporated into everything that made up the laws of time.

He shouldn't have looked and now it was too late and he would know when the moment came that whether he acted or not it was going to be his fault.

He was still leaning over, gripping the console with his head hanging between his arms, trying to collect himself when a concerned voice broke through the din of his own thoughts running in circles.

"Doctor! What's wrong? What's the matter?"

Tegan. Pulling at his shoulder and dragging him round to face her.

He straightened, forced a calmer expression onto his face and tugged his jacket back into a less rumpled state.

Tegan let go of him hesitantly.

"Are you alright? You were--" She stared at him as though looking for an explanation in the set of his face. "--shouting." She faltered. "Screaming."

The Doctor retrieved his hat from the console. Examined the brim of it as he spoke.

"I can't imagine why I would have been doing that."

He hadn't been had he?

"You have had a rather disturbed night's sleep," he suggested. "A nightmare perhaps."

She shook her head, but was clearly at a loss in the face of such an outright lie.

The Doctor felt a bit sorry, but things were – or were going to be – bad enough and he didn't feel up to explaining the complexities of the timelines to any human, or of having to argue with her as well as himself about why he couldn't do anything about it.

Especially not Tegan, with whom he'd already had one shouting match over his refusal to go back and change Adric's fate. She hadn't realised then, presumably still didn't how much of his reaction had been anger at himself, at how hard it had been to resist the temptation when it should have been unthinking. Something not even to be considered.

"Doctor?" Tegan asked again. "Are you sure you're alright?"

He was spared answering by the beep of the second of his tests completing. The TARDIS' timing this evening was apparently good. He looked at the results.

"Perfectly," he said. "And so is the TARDIS. Just a little bump as time travel goes. Nothing to worry about."

Tegan watched him doubtfully for long enough that he eventually had no option than to admit he was finished working on the checks.

"I'm alright," he said quietly, turning to face her properly. "Really. You don't have to worry."

"I don't have to worry when the TARDIS gets turned upside down, and next minute the only person round here who knows what they're doing with it is yelling his head off? That's reassuring. Glad you told me that, Doctor." She crossed her arms and glared at him. "Otherwise I might have worried!"

"Sorry," he said, though her rant had gone some way to snapping him back to reality so he couldn't entirely regret her reaction.

"So you should be." Her voice softened slightly. "So what happened?"

He sighed. "The collision I mentioned. It wasn't only a physical crash, it was a temporal one."

"You crashed into something in another time?"

"Precisely. This TARDIS in point of fact."

"This... You mean you really did crash into yourself?"

"Yes. And he – I – me then – fixed it. He knew how to fix it because I watched him fix it and I – he – remembered."

Tegan closed her eyes and her lips moved for a few seconds. "O-kay. I think I get it. So? It worked, everything's back to normal right? So why the yelling?"

The Doctor paused.

"It was just a bit of a shock, that's all. It's not good to know too much about your own future."

Tegan frowned. "But you – he was alive and okay wasn't he? Still flying around in the TARDIS and all that."

"Yes," the Doctor admitted. "More or less." He hesitated again, then decided there was one element that was not a lie and not the whole truth and might be somewhere close enough to the middle.

"On his own."

Tegan shrugged. "So you do eventually manage to get me and Turlough back home without picking up any _more_ strays then."

It was the Doctor's turn to stare, her simple assumption, stunning the speech from him for a moment. Of all the other possibilities, her first unthinking reaction was still trust that he'd take her safely home?

Neither did she appear to notice his open-mouthed reaction.

"How far in the future?" she asked.

He found his tongue. "I don't know."

"No hurry though?" For a moment she looked uncertain. "Still plenty of time before I need to get home...." She smiled. "And I'm sure you'd tell me there's still plenty to see! Right?"

The Doctor allowed himself to mirror her smile.

"Right." He spun back to the console. Timelines and history and loss could wait. Here was here and now was now and these were the days that at least part of him thought were worth remembering.

Which meant he had time enough to prove himself right.

He stepped briskly up to the controls and cast a smile over his should at Tegan, still standing where she'd paused.

"So?" he asked. "Where next?"

--END--

* * *

**A confession: I had a proper screaming childish tantrum at the end of this particular Doctor's run and years later with reruns and DVDs he's still my favourite, and fanfic writers are terribly mean to favourites so angst and woe it is. ;-) And fun too! **

**I took something of a potshot when placing this in the Fifth's timeline, and have set it a shade later than the references which Tenth rattles off, mostly because I wanted Nyssa already to be gone - angst and woe again, see!**


End file.
